No. 26: Kansas City Royals
Is it time to bring back the “Why the Royals Will Win the American League Central” column?
For many years, I was sports columnist in Kansas City. These years just so happened to perfectly mirror the crash of the Kansas City Royals. I wrote columns from 1996 to roughly 2011—the last couple of years I was already working at Sports Illustrated and so only wrote for the Kansas City Star on occasion—and in those 16 seasons, the Royals had:
Fifteen losing seasons
Four 100-loss seasons
Six managers, not including interim skipper Bob Schaeffer
Perhaps the best way to explain just how bad those Royals were is simply to list off their All-Stars each season—see how many you know!
1996: Jeff Montgomery
1997: José Rosado
1998: Dean Palmer*
1999: José Rosado
2000: Mike Sweeney and Jermaine Dye**
2001: Mike Sweeney
2002: Mike Sweeney
2003: Mike Sweeney and Mike MacDougal
2004: Ken Harvey
2005: Mike Sweeney
2006: Mark Redman
2007: Gil Meche
2008: Joakim Soria
2009: Zack Greinke
2010: Joakim Soria
2011: Aaron Crow
*The Star sent two people to that 1998 All-Star Game in Denver—me and now Hall of Fame beat writer Dick Kaegel. When Palmer was sent into the game in the eighth inning as a pinch-hitter, I said to Dick: “OK, do you want to write about this 6-4-3 double play or should I?” Palmer promptly hit into the 6-4-3 double play. It’s one of my proudest baseball calls.
**Jermaine Dye was actually voted to start in that 2000 All-Star Game. It goes without saying he was the only Royals’ All-Star starter in my time in Kansas City.
Quite a collection, huh? Thank goodness for Mike Sweeney! Actually, speaking of Mike—one of the nicest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to cover in sports—remember how I mentioned that the Royals had 15 out of 16 losing seasons in my time there? Well, the one winning season, 2003—when they went 83-79—actually triggered a clause in Mike’s contract that put him under team control. He had the clause put into the contract so that he would not get stuck playing for a terrible, losing team his entire career. So the Royals squeaked out a winning season, and poor Mike got hurt a bunch and got stuck playing for the next three Royals teams, all of which lost 100 games, all of which were agents of pure chaos. He deserved better. But, you know, we all did. He handled it with typical grace.
Anyway, the point is that it was all pretty bad, but at some point, pretty early in my time in Kansas City, I began to write an annual column called “Why the Royals Will Win the Division.” It was an idea originated by a funny Kansas City Star humor columnist in the 1950s and ’60s named Bill Vaughan, who used to do something like that with the old and hopeless Kansas City A’s.
But Bill’s column was meant for laughs. Mine—while, yes, not entirely serious—was meant for hope. I honestly tried to find reasons to believe, however slight. One year, for example, a lefty pitcher named Jeremy Affeldt broke out during spring training, and there was some real hope that with his mid-90s fastball and pretty spectacular curve, he could become an ace. The odds were against it, obviously, but the odds were always against the Royals. The point was hope. Jeremy ended up having a fine, 14-year career and was a key reliever on all three Giants World Series champs of the 2010s. Alas, though, Koufax he did not become.*
*Jeremy was also the first baseball player to address me as “Mr. Posnanski.”
The Royals got good almost immediately after I left town. Obviously. In 2011, while writing for Sports Illustrated, I wrote a story predicting that with their ultra-loaded minor league system they would win the World Series in 2015. They actually got to the World Series early, in 2014. But they won it in 2015.
That ultra-loaded minor league system of 2011—which, even at the time, Baseball America was calling the best in recent baseball history—ended up being a mixed bag. On the one hand, that core of young players went to back-to-back World Series and won a title, so it was obviously a massive, massive success.
On the other, though, none of the five players among Baseball America’s Top 20 prospects—Eric Hosmer (8), Mike Moustakas (9), Wil Myers (10), John Lamb (18), Mike Montgomery (19)—became that franchise player.* Hosmer had some good years, Moustakas for a time held the Royals’ record for homers and Myers was traded for superstar reliever Wade Davis.
*Interestingly, two guys who were not highly regarded prospects—catcher Salvador Perez and outfielder Lo Cain, who came over in the Zack Greinke trade—became bigger stars than any of the top guys.
Again, it’s all good, pennants fly forever, but the Royals did hope for more. And that why, after 2015, general manager Dayton Moore hoped to squeeze out a couple more good years from that Royals nucleus. Unfortunately, it went south pretty quickly, and after a couple of so-so seasons, the Royals bottomed out again, and have been playing sub.-.400 baseball since 2018.
And here I am again, wondering: Is it time to bring back the ol’ “Royals win the division” column? Sure, why not?